Professional Editing Cards

Editing video is one of those few applications that can truly push even the most modern systems to their limits. Encoding video and digital video effects are tremendously taxing on the CPU, and pushing video to and from hard drives can take forever if not done on the right hardware (think SCSI). Given the nature of this application, it is not surprising that many companies market PCI cards that are dedicated solely to video editing. They have specialized hardware that can perform these tasks quickly and efficiently. So lets take a look at what makes these cards so special.

Hardware features



The first thing one notices about professional video-editing cards is that they are one of the very few products that mention the minimum system configuration as at least a 500 MHz CPU, SCSI HDDs and 256 MB RAM, and recommended configurations far above that (like Gigahertz CPUs). However, this is not because they lack the power themselves, but simply because the host computer must have the power to keep up with the card. 

The first task any video-editing card has to perform is to capture data from an A/V source. They do this by capturing data in real time from sources like camcorders and VCRs. This eliminates repetitive rewinding by getting all the data in just one pass. Usually both analog and digital equipment is supported. If you’re using DV equipment, the editing system transfers the footage in its native format, thus eliminating degradation of video quality due to recompression. These tasks are handled through dedicated equipment like the Zoran ZR36067 PCI Bridge, which is a high-speed interface for passing video across the PCI bus. When coupled with the ZR36060 integrated JPEG codec, it is able to compress and decompress JPEG streams in real-time. 

Next, the cards give you the ability to apply effects like filters and transitions to video in real time. This is mostly done through plug-ins for software video-editing applications like Adobe Premiere. Hence, there is no wait while the computer processes the video, and instead one is able to see the result of the effect right there and then. Other possibilities are changing color, brightness, contrast etc.

Next, the cards give you the ability to save your work on a medium like tape through a recorder. This is also done in real-time, and that means that there is no need to render the video beforehand. In place of a VCR, you could also make a VCD/DVD or even stream the video on the web using a format like

RealMedia!

Output/Input



Due to the fact that most video-editing cards are able to handle a variety of different devices, most of them include an external box with connectors on it for input and output. For example, on the Pinnacle DV500 DVD there is a break-out box with one Composite video, one S-Video and a Firewire connector, and the card itself has another two Firewire links (one on the inside and one on the outside). This is for input and correspondingly they also have the same outputs. Also included are audio input/output connectors.

Software provided



Most of these cards would be worthless without the software that comes bundled with them. This is not only because of the fact that it is impossible to edit video without these apps, but also because the software provided has plug-ins designed especially for the hardware that is present on the card itself. While there are quite a few such applications, Adobe Premiere seems to be the most popular of them. Some of the other options are Pinnacle Studio, PowerDirector Pro, Ulead

VideoStudio, VideoFactory and WinProducer. 

Cost



Even the barest of video-editing cards cost tens of thousands of rupees, and can even run into a few lakh for the high-end versions. These cards are for professionals and not the average home user. 

Anuj Jain